


Blood just barely dry

by helpiamabug



Category: The Losers, The Losers (2010)
Genre: AU, Alternate Ending, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-16
Updated: 2010-12-16
Packaged: 2017-10-13 16:56:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/139542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/helpiamabug/pseuds/helpiamabug
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three ways Aisha al-Fadhil and the Losers parted ways, and one they didn't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blood just barely dry

**Author's Note:**

> feh. another one of those brainfart, gotta sit down and write it shenanigans.
> 
> standard disclaimer applies, aka characters not mine, no profit being made, plz to not sue!

**I:** Aisha fires a bullet into the meat of Jensen's shoulder and dives through the bathroom window into anonymity. She runs, and she never looks back. She definitely doesn't steal a rocket launcher and fire it into a gas tank as the sun rises, shadowing three figures kneeling on the ground. She never hears from the Losers again. She never finds Max, but Max finds her, and she bleeds out in Pakistan from a gut shot. She loses.

 **II:** Aisha smothers Clay in his sleep. There's enough screaming and banging on the walls on a regular basis at the Port O' Call motel that no one thinks his death throes are anything out of the ordinary, and all of a sudden her father is avenged. She climbs out the window onto the roof into her underwear, Tech9 tucked into the small of her back, and she runs like the wind.

She can't outrun the Losers, though. Last thing she remembers is a hazy figure and a stinging in her neck - and she wakes up wrapped shoulders to toes in duct tape. She can't move a muscle (it's doubly annoying, because her nose really fucking itches, and Pooch was right) and when she looks around - well, she's in the parking lot at Langley with some heavy duty weaponry leveled her way.

Of all the things she expected from the team after she killed Clay, justice wasn't one of them.

 **III:** So, Max is dead. It's pretty anticlimatic in the end - six months of following dead end leads around the Middle East and Central America, finally running him to ground, of all places, at the Arecibo Observatory. He spits and snarls and laughs like the maniac he is, but in the end - well, Clay just grunts and touches Aisha's shoulder, and the rest of the Losers leave her with Max. He stops laughing pretty quick, after that.

There's something about close quarters combat that she finds far more satisfying than building a bomb, or firing a RPG at a gas tank, or even taking off a man's head from 500 yards with Cougar's sniper rifle after he's been compromised - no, right from the start this was how she knew it was going to end: crouched over Max at the bottom of the observatory basin, covered in blood, her arm crushing his windpipe as she stares into his eyes. She wants him to know exactly who killed him. He gasps and claws at her face, gouges her eyes, and as she digs her fingers into his carotid she half-hopes he haunts her so she can live this over and over. This is exactly what she wanted.

Aisha feels hands gripping the back of her shirt and hauling her up, patting her down for bruising and knifewounds, and then those hands wrap around her and draw her in, Clay and Pooch and Jensen gripping her with raw knuckles and grinning like idiots. She pauses for a moment, and relaxes into their touch.

The thing is, there's this whole question of now what? It's not exactly like she'd ever been shy about getting exactly what she wanted, and now that she's got what she spent the last 4 years hunting for, she can't pin down what's next. She feels strangely skittish - yeah, the rest of the team are watching her, waiting for her to get after killing Clay, but here's the thing: Clay was right. Her father was a bastard. After her mother died, he dragged her around Africa and showed her the worst of humanity, taught her to kill and feel no remorse, how to launder money and groom young girls to be prostitutes and mules and worst of all, she loved him anyway. She wasn't joking when she looked down at Clay and told him that it was a liability to care about the men serving under him, because that was what she knew. She loved her father and the memory of her mother - loved the sound of shell casings falling on a concrete floor and loved that she knew 24 ways to kill a man with a pen or his own bootlaces. There's been nothing else for her because for so long, there couldn't be.

She knows she won't find what she's looking for with the Losers, either.

Aisha holsters her gun and walks away.

 **IV:** The team never finds Max. Instead, some Delta force SOG finds him sheltering in the caves outside Kandahar, and drags him to the Hague to stand trial for crimes against humanity. He's guilty as sin, of course (the prosecutors find their case helped immensely by the anonymous delivery of a zip drive with detailed information about all the back street deals Max was running) and he'll spend the rest of his life in a 6x9 cell, but it's not the closure Aisha wanted. She knows it's not the closure that the rest of the team wanted, either - but at least they have their lives back. They run special ops when they feel like it as long as it's the right kind of op, do some consulting, laze around in CIA safehouses and drink too much. Pooch can drop his son off at daycare without wearing a hat and dark glasses and scaring the bejeezus out of the childcare workers, and Jensen - well, Jensen's already been arrested twice for protesting outside the Hanover town hall after the Petunias were booted from the playoffs.

Aisha wants to leave, sometimes, but she doesn't have anywhere else to go. She got itchy once after yet another job gone right, and made it far as Logan International where she found Clay leaning lazily against the ticket counter and Cougar smirking at her from the roof of the parking garage.

She stops fighting the urge to run after a few months. She settles in, and sometimes she even thinks she might be happy.

The one thing she regrets most about choosing her father when her mother was sick and desperate and dying, is that she never thought she'd want a family again. Her mother wanted to teach her to make falafel and sew kurta and gossip late at night in the kitchen and hid the black eyes she got when she asked where Fadhil had been last night, and although Aisha sat there and watched her mother cook, she wanted so much to be in the garage with her father, cleaning guns and smoking cigarettes. Then the doctors gave her months, and then weeks, and her mother was so skinny and ethereal that Aisha never even notice when she disappeared. When she left - well, when she left, she never looked back. The Losers took away her father, but they gave her themselves instead.

Maybe she didn't know what she was doing when she agreed to sign on with the Losers, but now she knows that she loves ham and pineapple on her pizza even though it makes Pooch retch if he smells it, and despite Cougar being a tough James Dean style sonofabitch, he loves to sprawl on the couch and watch Bridget Jones's Diary when he's hungover. Jensen makes the best scrambled eggs she's ever had (even if he makes them over coals in the bottom of a coffee tin) and Clay - well, he's Clay, and that's enough.


End file.
